In recent years, the fast food or carryout food industry has provided a continually expanding variety of foodstuffs, and has expanded to the point where individual orders frequently consist of separate foodstuffs.
Normally, such separate servings, even if part of a single meal order, will be placed in separate closed containers. As is readily apparent, this not only requires the handling of multiple containers, but also introduces a considerable amount of additional expense when one considers the hundreds of containers which are conceivably used during the day at a typical fast food establishment.
From the ecological standpoint, the necessity of having to dispose of several containers utilized to hold various foodstuffs for a single meal is also not particularly desirable. Thus, the replacement of multiple containers with a single, partitioned meal tray is deemed to be advantageous and desirable from both the economic and ecological perspective.
While such meal trays with partitioned interiors are known in the art, such trays are normally of a substantially rectangular configuration, with the partitions extending from mid-points on the walls of the rectangular container to a central area where they are joined together. Examples of such partitioned food containers are found in Liu et al. U.S. Pat. No. 5,326,017 and Rigby U.S. Pat. No. 5,356,070.
However, such partitioned meal trays of the prior art are not particularly designed for use by the fast food industry. Specifically, the partitioned meal trays disclosed in the two aforementioned patents do not meet the closure requirements of the fast food industry, and in fact do not provide for a closure or cover at all. In addition, such meal trays of the prior art tend to be relatively expensive in fabrication cost, and incorporate materials which would be considered contaminants in any paper recycling process.
A partitioned or multi-compartment container which is more in line with the requirements of the fast food industry is disclosed in Eisman U.S. Pat. No. 4,848,648, which is assigned to the assignee of the present invention. The container disclosed in the latter patent is capable of accommodating multiple foodstuffs of different variety in a single container with an integral locking lid. However, if more than two or three items are to be stored in that container, the length of the container might be considered to be beyond that which can be easily handled, since the compartments are longitudinally aligned.
Thus, as indicated above, the prior art is considered to be lacking in that it does not provide an economically and ecologically acceptable container which is not only capable of being closed but also conveniently sized and configured so that it can accommodate multiple foodstuffs in segregated fashion while still minimizing the overall volume or space taken up by the container.